Coral Gables has just fined FPL $64,000, and it’s not stopping there

Coral Gables has levied thousands of dollars in fines on FPL after it says the utility did not fulfill its promise of completely restoring electricity to city residents after Hurricane Irma.

Between Monday and Wednesday, the city fined the utility $64,500 and says it will keep assessing the fines until all power is restored.

FPL publicly promised that all power would be restored in Miami-Dade County by Sunday, a week after Irma. The company failed to meet its goal and amended its target date to Tuesday.

As of 5:50 p.m. Wednesday, FPL said 380 customers were without power in Miami-Dade. It does not show data for individual cities.

“Our minimum housing code says that every dwelling must have electricity,” Coral Gables city attorney Craig Leen said Wednesday. “A violator is someone who causes a violation and FPL unjustifiably failed to return power. They caused people to not have power and that can’t be tolerated.

“It is evident that FPL was not prepared at all for this storm, considering that it was supposed to be almost a direct hit, and it wasn’t.”

FPL fired back with a statement Tuesday: “We understand that it’s extremely frustrating for our customers to be without power. That said, frivolous lawsuits and ludicrous code violations that attempt to pressure us into providing preferential treatment for their City will not work.

“Our focus is on restoring power to all of our customers, and we will not be moved by self-entitled politicians who are looking for someone to blame. Coral Gables has for many years resisted FPL’s well-documented efforts to trim trees and harden our electric system.”

In Miami-Dade, nearly 900,000 of FPL’s 1.1 million customers were without power after Irma.

Last Thursday evening, Coral Gables issued a cease and desist letter to FPL, demanding all trees on downed power lines be removed by 5 p.m. Friday and all homes be powered up by 11:45 p.m. Sunday.

While the trees were removed, not all residents got their power back.

That’s when the city started calculating fines. By Tuesday, the city issued FPL two $15,000 fines.

“At that point, we only had 92 percent of the city with electricity,’’ Leen said. “What could have been close to $1 million fine ended up being much less because we capped it at $15,000 per day for the first two days.”

The city added another $33,000 fine on Wednesday. It based that number on a $500 fine for each home that didn’t have power. By Wednesday, 99.7 percent of the city had electricity.

“There are 22,000 households in Coral Gables. If you do the math, three-tenths of a percentage means that there are 66 households without electricity. That’s about $33,000 in fines just for today,” Leen said. “And, yes, that may rise.”

This story was originally published September 20, 2017 at 6:21 PM with the headline "Coral Gables has just fined FPL $64,000, and it’s not stopping there."